The War Against Fertility

By

Martin Morse Wooster

Updated April 1, 2008 12:01 a.m. ET

Fatal Misconception By Matthew Connelly (Belknap, 521 pages, $35)

ENLARGE

It is a clich&eacute; but nevertheless true that philanthropists and government bureaucrats often do more harm than good, not least when they set out to change the world. In the second half of the 20th century they actually tried to control the world's population. The idea was to encourage -- even coerce -- the women of the Third World to have fewer children. In "Fatal Misconception," Matthew Connelly, a professor at Columbia University, traces the rise and fall of the population-control movement and describes its bitter legacy.

Mr. Connelly's narrative begins in the late 19th century, but it takes on real momentum in the early 20th, with the crusading efforts of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). In 1914, Mr. Connelly recounts, Sanger and her allies tried to come up with a phrase that would capture the idea of population control and encourage women to limit their fertility. They pondered "voluntary motherhood," "voluntary parenthood," "family control" and (tellingly) "race control." They ended up with "birth control."

From the start, birth controllers were allied with eugenicists who wanted to manipulate the global population by creating -- to put it bluntly -- more smart people and fewer dumb ones. In 1940, the noted New York University sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild claimed that eugenics and birth control were "two great movements" that "have drawn so close together as to be almost indistinguishable." In 1950, Sanger said that Hitler's eugenic policies should not be used as an excuse to stop sterilizing people who are "dysgenic of body and mind."

The population controllers reorganized after World War II with the help of John D. Rockefeller 3rd, a birth-control advocate whose wealth created, in 1952, the Population Council, a population-control advocacy group. Six of the council's 10 founding members were eugenicists. The Ford Foundation also began giving money to the cause, initiating its own programs and handing out its own grants. Dr. Clarence Gamble, a Procter & Gamble heir, attempted various free-lance efforts to promote birth control in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He routinely referred to the citizens of these two countries as "coolies" and "natives."

As Mr. Connelly observes, the dispensers of population-control grants often enjoyed a kind of pasha existence. Frank Notestein, a longtime adviser to John D. Rockefeller 3rd, recalled that wherever he went -- Cairo, Karachi, Seoul -- he faced the prospect of a groaning table, only to face "another day of tremendous eating." Douglas Ensminger, who ran the Ford Foundation's New Delhi office, had a staff of nine people -- gardeners, maids, cooks -- to serve him. At least foundation officers knew how to benefit from the population that already existed.

The eugenicists of the 1920s and 1930s dreamed of a "world eugenics" movement that could regulate global fertility. That movement, Mr. Connelly argues, nearly became a reality in 1970, when population controllers in Washington, New York and London appeared on the verge of creating a new international order. It was around this time that huge government aid programs -- alongside United Nations initiatives -- took over from the foundations the greater burden of the population-control agenda. Mr. Connelly notes that many people had by then become aware of "the dark chapters of eugenics and medical experimentation." Thus the movement shifted its emphasis. It did not give up its eugenicist mission entirely, but it also claimed to be eradicating poverty and saving the environment.

Such aggressive paternalism (to use the word ironically) created a backlash from its supposed beneficiaries. Third Worlders noticed that the population controllers were, for the most part, white men, many of whom had worked in colonial governments. Feminists complained about an insensitive male establishment telling women what to do with their lives. Adrienne Germain, who worked at the Population Council and the Ford Foundation's population office in the early 1970s, recalled (in a recent interview with Mr. Connelly) that senior staff members "could walk the corridors and be in meetings and talk about 'users' and 'acceptors'" of contraception "and have absolutely no interest in who these people were." The World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974 was a staging ground for protests.

The end came in two gruesome stages. When Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, declared martial law in 1975, she appointed her son Sanjay to be the nation's chief population controller. He proceeded to flatten slums and then tell the residents that they could get a new house if they would agree to be sterilized. Government officials were given sterilization quotas. Within a year, six million Indian men and two million women were sterilized. At least 2,000 Indians died as a result of botched sterilization operations.

Still, the population-control establishment cheered the Indians on. Kingsley Davis, a demographer at the University of California (Berkeley), said that the brutal Indian measures were necessary because, as he put it, population in the Third World was best limited by "a totalitarian government, highly competent and ruthlessly committed, ruling a docile mass of semi-educated but thoroughly indoctrinated urbanites."

But then, in 1976, India held an election. The ruling Congress Party was voted out of office after 29 years, with anti-Congress majorities proving to be largest in states where sterilization had been the most draconian. This election, says Mr. Connelly, was proof that "population control had no mandate" among the people it was meant to help. Even so, the population-control movement had one last campaign to champion. It offered technical assistance to China's "one child" policy of 1978-83, even helping to pay for computers that allowed Chinese officials to track "birth permits," the official means by which the government banned families from having more than one child and required the aborting of additional children.

Even for the most ardent "small is beautiful" believers, China's policy went too far, inducing a kind of global revulsion. At the same time, the pro-life movement in the U.S. was gaining momentum. In 1984, the Reagan administration announced that it would not fund any international agency that subsidized abortions. The effect was a series of severe cuts in the budgets of global-population agencies. The population-control movement, though never disappearing completely, had lost most of its power.

As Mr. Connelly observes, global fertility is now in fact going down. But only 5% of the decline can be traced to programs funded by international population agencies. Women are having fewer children, particularly as they become wealthier. They are doing so voluntarily.

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